Police and spy agencies will soon be able to press technology firms to help them access suspected terrorists’ and criminals’ encrypted messages on platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram after the Morrison government struck a last-minute deal with Labor.

Attorney-General Christian Porter announced what he called "a massive win for the Australian people" on Tuesday afternoon with just two days left of the parliamentary year.

"We've been told by our law enforcement heads and by ASIO that this legislation was necessary not to give them an edge but to give them, in their words, a fighting chance."

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said the government had agreed to Labor’s demands to make changes to the legislation including greater oversight and limiting authorities’ access to encrypted communications to the most serious crimes.

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These will include serious drug and gun offences as well as terrorism, murder and child sex crimes.

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security would continue to scrutinise the bill after it passed Parliament.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Labor's support comes despite Mr Dreyfus also saying that the bill was “far from perfect and there are likely to be significant outstanding issues”.

The bill aims to get around what police and national security agencies have said is one of their greatest modern challenges: the fact that much communication in the modern era is done on encrypted messaging platforms that are very difficult to decode other than for the sender and receiver. Even technology companies themselves often do not have the decrypted content.

The new powers will allow police and national security agencies, once they have a warrant to access the content of a particular communication, to serve a technology firm with a notice to help the authorities.

In its most extreme version, called a “technical capability notice”, a company would have to build a new capability to get access to the communication.

The bill specifies that such a capability cannot introduce a “systemic weakness” that could imperil all encrypted communications on the same platform - a key concern of privacy groups and the technology sector.

In one of the most significant compromises, the bill will define what constitutes a "systemic weakness".

There will also be greater oversight of the technical notice capability powers. Any application by police or spies will have to be authorised by both the federal Attorney-General and the Communications Minister.

And if a technology company disagrees with the government on whether a new capability introduces a systemic weakness, a former judge and a technical expert will be called on help resolve the dispute.

The bill was stuck in the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, which is dominated by government MPs but has also traditionally operated in a bipartisan way in recognition that national security should be above politics.

Mr Dreyfus said that committee would take the unusual step of continuing to scrutinise the legislation even after it had passed into law and recommend amendments if required.

It is not certain that the government would agree to any changes once the bill has passed into law, even if the committee recommended them. But Mr Porter said the committee would review the legislation in the first 12 months and it was "not unusual" for complex legislation to be amended in the first year or two.

The government had applied heavy pressure on Labor to support the new law’s passage before Christmas, meaning it had to be crammed into Parliament’s final sitting fortnight, which ends on Thursday.

Spy agencies and police have said that the Christmas and New Year period poses a heightened risk of terrorist attacks.